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I have recently started using Acronis True Image Home 2010 for my data backup needs. I made one system image at start and now a days I backup my important files manually.

Before having come across Acronis, I used to depend on Windows Restore feature only and that did help me go back on many occasions. Now I am inclined towards disabling Windows Restore since I think I will be able to roll back to a stable state (State Image) if I face any problems. Plus, I often make backup copies of my most important files on a separate disk and have softwares' setups if I need to reinstall any of them.

Q1. Should I disable Windows Restore? What do you think?
Q2. Can I disable Image Monitor service? And the other two services?

BAZ raises the issue of "data backup needs." In computer parlance, data files are storage files; they are not program (*.exe) files, therefore, for the sake of this post, until one defines "data," I am not wont to make assumptions as how "best" to proceed - especially if one is to rely on System Restore to recover or replace lost or damaged JPEGs of the dog.

A suggestion has been made to make a copy of the HDD and put it away. Why? The assumption must certainly be that the files on the HDD are, presently, in a pristine state. Actually, Windows files on the install disc are in pristine state, everything thereafter is, well . . . who knows. My point is, following this recommendation provides no added security especially if my system is infected with a date-sensitive worm.

Given its limitations, I should think further debunking of the implied security of System Restore need not be addressed.

Because it was not asked for, I will not fully define what I consider a rational backup protocol except as follows:

1. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it is the OS partition that will become unstable - for whatever reason. Create and place the OS on an "OS-only" partition on the HDD. If ever one needs to go back to square one, format the partition and reinstall.

2. Once installed, institute and religiously follow an image-backup regimen. How often this is accomplished and whether one does full, incremental, or differential backups is a personal choice. For example, I only accomplish full image backups because (1) my OS-only partition of 100GB contains about 60GB of files which can be backed up in less than 20 minutes by Acronis - which I use and (2) creating incremental or differential backups are not an issue - until they have to be restored; the question I ask myself is, what would I like to do, restore one frequently made full image backup or restore a week-old full image back up and six incremental or differential backups at the same time. Anyone who has restored a slew of partial backups understands.

3. If one concludes that yesterday the OS was OK and today it is infected with whatever, format the OS partition and restore yesterday's image backup, which, of course, is stored other than on the HDD containing the OS partition.

4. Image backups of the remaining partitions/HDDs can be created on an as-needed basis, which is to imply that unless one is talking about a dynamic DBase directory, e.g., there is no need to regularly include image backups (backups in general) of unchanged or non-essential partitions/files.

The thrust of my discussion is that one can restore a full image backup of an OS partition, as I have defined it, faster and more reliably than utilizing System Restore - which is neither fast nor 100% reliable.

Time to Restore Image - Acronis, Macrium Reflect, Windows 7I recently restored my Windows 7 disk using Acronis Western Digital Edition, Macrium Reflect, and Windows 7. See results below for both creating the image and restoring the image. The compressed image files were all in the range of 45-50 GB. The associated boot DVD was used in all cases to...

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